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A Time Lord's Times

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His TARDIS now piloted by others, Jon Pertwee considers his own regenerations.


It has been more than 15 years since Jon Pertwee left the role, but the white-haired man in the opera cape, velvet jacket and ruffled shirt is still instantly recognizable as the third Doctor. At 71, Pertwee looks much the same as he did in 1970 when he replaced Patrick Troughton.

Although Doctor Who had already been on for seven years when Pertwee took over, he denies any long-held ambitions to play the Doctor. "No, I had never seen it. I was married to actress Jean Marsh, and she was in Doctor Who, years and years ago. You may remember her; she was in Upstairs, Downstairs. She invented it, 'cause her mother was in service."

Marsh, who played Morgaine in the 1989 Doctor Who episode "Battlefield," first appeared on the series as companion Sara Kingdom in the 12-part William Hartnell story, "The Daleks' Master Plan." Sara began her acquaintance with the first Doctor by killing her brother, Bret Vyon (Nicholas Courtney, the future Brigadier Lethbridge-Stewart). Marsh was the second companion killed on the series. She later appeared in such genre films as Return to Oz and Willow (and discussed them in STARLOG #135).

"But in those days," Pertwee continues, "Jean said to me, 'Go on, have a look at me in this show.' So, that's the only time that I really watched Doctor Who, because I was pretty busy in my own right.

"Then, I was doing a radio show called The Navy Lark, and one of my company said, 'Why don't you put yourself up for the Doctor Who part that Patrick Troughton's leaving?' So, I suggested it to my agent."

Pertwee soon learned that he was already being considered for the role, as was actor Ron Moody. "Moody made a big name for himself playing Fagin in Oliver. I also played it, so there must be some sort of connection between the two of us. But they asked me to do it, and so, I did it for five years."

Although he fondly remembers his time as the Doctor, Pertwee isn't blind to the series' shortcomings. Due to budgetary considerations, high production values weren't always in evidence—even with as fundamental a prop as the TARDIS console. According to Pertwee, the console once had to be altered for a scene in which he was to remove and replace a component. A man was sent to the set, armed with hammer and chisel.

"Where do you want the hole, guy?" the workman said.

Pertwee indicated the appropriate place in the console, and advised the man to be careful.

"Right," the man said, and struck the chisel. The blow sent a huge crack across the console panel, splitting it.

"So, I hit him," Pertwee says. But there was retribution. "All the unions immediately went out on strike. Fortunately, the producer backed me up."

Pertwee took a personal interest in seeing that the series was as well-executed as time and budget would allow. "I don't like cardboard monsters, and I know that Doctor Who is much loved because of the sets that look as though they're going to fall down, and the bottoms of cave walls that go at 90 degrees, which used to drive me crazy; I used to get people to throw sand on the corners, and round them off and make them look scruffier. But fans just accepted that with Doctor Who. They always did."

Nor does Pertwee hold the immensely popular Daleks in high regard. "I thought the Daleks ridiculous with their sink pumps and their egg whisks, and tennis balls stuck all over them." His least favorite story is "The Day of the Daleks," which he calls "that idiotic thing with the Daleks surrounding a country house that was having a Commonwealth conference." He recalls a conversation which took place on the set of that episode.

"I said, 'Well, where are all the Daleks?' "And the director, who shall he nameless said, 'There.' There were two.

"I said, 'How are they going to surround with two?' He said, 'We'll have to reshoot all the time.' You can't do that.'

"We did that, and there was another lovely scene where somebody went in and said, 'We're being invaded by these dreadful Daleks, and they're surrounding the place. You've got to get the hell out of here!' The director filmed this whole sequence, and I was having a cup of tea, and we came back halfway through, thank God. Because they were all coming out of the doors very slowly, saying [Pertwee assumes several deep, stuffed-shirt British, African and Asian voices], 'Well, goodbye. Very nice to have met you. I do hope I see you again. Oh yes, that will be very nice.

"I said, 'There are Daleks out there, Jack! What are they doing? They're supposed to scream and run.' So, they had to reshoot all that; it was dreadful, dreadful. And yet, funnily enough, it's quite a popular one. The videocassette sells well."

Pertwee's own favorite episode is "The Daemons." "I like 'The Daemons' because there weren't any monsters; it was just done with atmosphere. We had wind machines, so that Katy [Manning, who played companion Jo Grant] was blown all over the place, and that scene by the church, when the bushes all went rurrurrurr; it was really very scary. The only monster, really, that appeared was at the end, when the big satyr grew. And Bok the stupid gargoyle was in the end, but he wasn't very alarming, more of a laugh."

A Briton's Thoughts

Like all of the Pertwee episodes, "The Daemons" was filmed in color, but the color prints of this and several other segments have since been lost (STARLOG #163). As Pertwee explains, "About 25 percent of the programs were scrapped. Some idiot in authority said, 'Get rid of all of them. We can't afford all this storage for Doctor Who. We're never going to use it again.' It's the BBC's biggest seller all over the world. They never anticipated all that, so they scrapped them. Then, they said, 'Well, we can't show them in black and white' [the format of the surviving prints], little realizing that the fans don't give a damn if they haven't seen it. In fact, the first part of ["Invasion of the Dinosaurs"] is missing completely. They never got that one back.

"But they've found them in the most extraordinary places. One turned up in a Mormon temple and another in Nigeria."

Thanks to the expanding TV market, both British and American fans will soon have the opportunity to see the complete run of surviving episodes, including the black and white ones, in their original order. British Satellite Broadcasting (BSB) has been showing the series with great success; and the Sci-Fi Channel (expected to debut in '91) plans to air the episodes in their original half-hour format. PBS stations will continue to broadcast Dr. Who in 90 to 160-minute blocks.

Recalling how he came to leave Doctor Who, Pertwee says, "They came to me, and said, did I want to do another series? I said I wasn't all that keen, because most of my team had left: producer Barry Letts and script editor Terrance Dicks. Roger [Delgado, Pertwee's close friend and the first actor to play the Master] had been killed, and I thought that was rather the end of an era. I thought, 'Well, I think I'll leave.' But, I said I would stay on for another series if the BBC gave me a raise. They said, 'We're very sorry to see you go!'

"I said, 'You wouldn't like to have a meeting? Can't we sit around a table and discuss this matter?'

"They said, 'No. We've got a budget, and we work to it. If you want more money, we'll have to get somebody else.' And they did. That's the way the BBC works."

In addition to TV, Pertwee has been a radio star (The Navy Lark ran in Britain for nearly two decades), a theatrical actor, a circus performer, a vaudevillian and a cabaret entertainer. Such a background isn't all that unusual in his family. Pertwee's father, Roland, was an actor and a respected writer of short stories, films and plays. Jon's brother, Michael, has written screenplays for such films as The Mouse on the Moon (based on Leonard Wibberley's novel) and (with Melvin Frank) A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum. Jon Pertwee played the slave trader Lycus in the British stage production of Forum, only to see the part go to Phil Silvers for the movie version. During the film's shooting, however, Pertwee was asked to reprise the role when Silvers became ill and refused to leave his hotel room. As Pertwee tells the story, when Silvers learned Pertwee was taking over, he made "a miraculous recovery," and immediately returned to the set. Pertwee did eventually appear in the film, but in a smaller role.

His family's theatrical background had a definite influence on Pertwee's decision to become an actor. "They had been in it for generations, on both sides. My grandmother was an opera singer, and her sisters were in the original Gilbert and Sullivan operas; one of them, Dame Evan Moore, was Dame at the English Theater. She was married to H.V. Esmond, a famous actor-manager. Their daughter, Jill Esmond, married Laurence Olivier. So, he joined the family. All that lot were in the theater, and my father, and my grandfather on my mother's side, Conrad Veidt, was a famous German actor [seen in Casablanca]. We're all in it. I never would have done anything else."

An Actor's Lives

As a working actor, Pertwee has made countless TV appearances, primarily in England. Fans of The Avengers may recall Pertwee's brief but manic performance as an "L.B.E." (lovable British eccentric), Brigadier Whitehead, in the first color show, "From Venus With Love." The segment led off the run of episodes currently airing on the American cable channel A&E.

After leaving Doctor Who (which he also discussed in STARLOG #79 & #130), Pertwee hosted a British TV quiz show, Whodunnit?, before moving on to other projects. He hasn't seen much of Doctor Who since his time in the TARDIS. "No. Well, only very, very briefly, by accident, really, because I know Sylvester [McCoy, who plays the Seventh Doctor] very well. But I've been shooting Worzel Gummidge, my present series. And that's shown on the same day. So, being my type, I'm usually busy watching myself."

Pertwee has gained a whole new generation of fans with Worzel Gummidge, the popular British TV series in which he plays a scarecrow. The series began "10 years ago. We've had a good trot out of that. Then, on our seventh or eighth year, the company that I was making it for lost their franchise to operate. At that time, we had 12.5 million viewers a week. It was pretty galling and upsetting to have vast figures like that proving that you were a very big success, and yet you were out of business. So, we then went to New Zealand, and we made them there for three years. And that's why it was called Worzel Gummidge Down Under, with an all New Zealand cast, plus just myself, my leading lady and the director."

Worzel Gummidge isn't shown in the States, but another Pertwee fantasy, The Curious State of Santa Claus, frequently turns up at Christmas both here and in England. James Coco plays the title role. "It was just about three of us in it," Pertwee recalls. "The late James Coco was a lovely man, I adored working with him. I played an Austrian psychiatrist, and he came to see me because he had a big hang-up. Everywhere he went, there were Father Christmases on every street corner, ringing bells. He got fed up about this, and he went to see me, and I said, [Pertwee assumes a Viennese accent] 'Well, why are you fed up? What is wrong with Father Christmas ringing bells? It's Christmas; you must expect that.'

"He said, 'No, but I'm Santa Claus.'

"I said, 'Yeah, yeah, you're Santa Claus, he's Santa Claus.'

"He said, 'But I am Santa Claus.'

"So, the whole thing developed, and he told the story of Christmas. It's a fascinating film, because the whole history of Christmas is remarkable.

"Then, I think, 'My God, he is Father Christmas.' I send him away, and then, you see him with his reindeer going up through the sky on his way home. It was a lovely thing to make. Absolutely beautiful."

A Writer's Days

A recent Pertwee project was a British SF TV pilot, Starwatch. "The premise was that they had discovered that under Stonehenge, there was a cave, and in that was a crystal. The crystal basically operated what was going on in the world of weather. They discovered that this crystal was all out of sync. So, somebody had to go off into other planets, where they had other crystals, and organize the whole thing to get them all together so that they could work properly again.

"It was very green in subject and ecologically-minded, and for saving the rain forests, and anti-hunting whales, and so, it should have been dead right for the time." No one, however, will ever see it. "Starwatch is a dead duck. It was a brilliant idea, a wonderful concept, but the young man who did it, Chris Leach, is very, very much of a far-ahead thinker. He used to work for Gerry Anderson, who made those puppet films [Thunderbirds, Fireball XL-5, etc.). He's a wonderful puppeteer. Marvelous models, the most effective in the business.

"Chris worked for Anderson, and he learned his trade very well. His model making was marvelous. He put together a presentation pilot, not a pilot of a show; just me, in costume, sitting and looking right down the bottle of the camera, and telling the viewer, the prospective purchaser, what it was all about, and what we were intending to do.

"But it cost him a fortune. Chris even cast the thing, and put people under contract. Of course, this is absolute madness, because the producers that buy it might say, 'I don't want her. I don't want him. I want to put my people in,' or 'My director wants to have choice cut.' Suddenly, he has lumbered them with somebody that they don't like. So, it all went haywire, and we're never going to hear any more of Starwatch, because it was far too expensive."

Throughout his career, Pertwee has also, from time to time, written, co-written, or edited a number of books ("about four, five. Something like that"). These literary forays began during his Royal. Navy days in World War II. "I used to write during the War, when I was a wireless operator, in the lower deck of the Navy. I wrote articles for a magazine called Sparks, and they were compiled and out together in a book. There's my autobiography [Moon Boots and Dinner Suits], and I've written Jon Pertwee's Book of Monsters. I wrote the foreward, and, with this friend of mine, we collected short stories by all different people for it. When I'm bored, I get myself involved with writing.

"Now, I've written this book all about Namesakes, sort of a trivia quiz game." This latest tome, written by Pertwee and Mel Croucher, consists of common terms, such as "Hippocratic Oath" or "taxi," for which the reader must guess the right derivation from among three witty and/or outrageous choices.

Pertwee remains proud of his association with Doctor Who. He's still a frequent guest at conventions. "I love doing conventions, and I like meeting fans, but on a very easy level. I don't like being lionized, and I don't like people being stupid. Sometimes they can ask some incredible questions. But I like people, and I like kids, and I like to talk to them."

Not only does Pertwee talk to fans on these occasions, he also poses with them in full Third Doctor regalia from his personal collection. It's clear that, after all these years, he still enjoys playing the role. Looking at the distinguished, white-haired figure, his blue eyes alight in what Terrance Dicks has repeatedly called his "young-old face," and listening to the familiar, charismatic voice, it is easy for fans to forget. For a moment, they aren't talking with Jon Pertwee. They are talking with the Doctor.


KAREN FUNK BLOCHER & TERESA MURRAY, Arizona-based writers, profiled John Levene in STARLOG #165.


Captions:

Jon Pertwee and Colin Baker take a break backstage at the recent Doctor Who play The Ultimate Adventure.

"Who do you love?" seems to be the expression Pertwee is wearing. He does look rather dashing.

Nicholas Courtney (left), the late Patrick Troughton and Pertwee field questions at a fan convention.

Who are you looking at? It's Jon Pertwee in his Doctor's outfit.

This Doctor may be out, but Pertwee still enjoys doing conventions. "I like people, and I like to talk to them."

It has been 15 years since Pertwee left the role. but the man in the opera cape and ruffled shirt is still recognizable as the third Doctor.

Although he fondly remembers his days as a Doctor, Pertwee couldn't cure the show's "shortcomings."

Who's Who? Pertwee poses with predecessors Patrick Troughton (left) and William Hartnell during 1973's -"The Three Doctors."

Disclaimer: These citations are created on-the-fly using primitive parsing techniques. You should double-check all citations. Send feedback to whovian@cuttingsarchive.org

  • APA 6th ed.: Murray, Karen Funk Blocher & Teresa (number 167 (June 1991)). A Time Lord's Times. Starlog p. 49.
  • MLA 7th ed.: Murray, Karen Funk Blocher & Teresa. "A Time Lord's Times." Starlog [add city] number 167 (June 1991), 49. Print.
  • Chicago 15th ed.: Murray, Karen Funk Blocher & Teresa. "A Time Lord's Times." Starlog, edition, sec., number 167 (June 1991)
  • Turabian: Murray, Karen Funk Blocher & Teresa. "A Time Lord's Times." Starlog, number 167 (June 1991), section, 49 edition.
  • Wikipedia (this article): <ref>{{cite news| title=A Time Lord's Times | url=http://cuttingsarchive.org/index.php/A_Time_Lord%27s_Times | work=Starlog | pages=49 | date=number 167 (June 1991) | via=Doctor Who Cuttings Archive | accessdate=18 December 2024 }}</ref>
  • Wikipedia (this page): <ref>{{cite web | title=A Time Lord's Times | url=http://cuttingsarchive.org/index.php/A_Time_Lord%27s_Times | work=Doctor Who Cuttings Archive | accessdate=18 December 2024}}</ref>


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